Part One: Industry 5.0

Industry 5.0: 
Intelligent Machines, 
Elevated Human Experience

Mark Patrick
Greetings everyone. As you can probably tell by this British accent, this is not Raymond Yin. He's taking a well-earned break. So today you have me, Mark Patrick, Technical Lead for Mouser Electronics in EMEA and once again, your host for The Tech Between Us podcast where today we'll be taking a deep dive into the fascinating world beyond Industry 4.
Let's face it, the pandemic really shook up our supply chains and you could say we're still recovering, highlighting the need for more resilient and adaptive systems. Not only that, it also caused us to take a moment and focus on the ever-growing need to be better stewards of our planet and its resources. Enter Industry 5, where technologies like AI and IoT are poised to transform how we manufacture and distribute goods. But what does this translation mean for businesses, workers, and society as a whole?
With me today is industry expert, Leonardo Dentone, Program Chair of the International Society of Automation, or ISA Denmark, join our conversation as we explore the philosophy, technological advances, and industry implications behind this human-centric evolution. 
Leonardo, welcome to the Tech Between us.

Leonard Dentone 
Hello Mark. I'm very excited to be here and hello to everybody around the world who's listening to us.

Mark Patrick 
Very good. We're really pleased we could have this discussion today. Let's start with a little bit of background information and tell us a little bit about the International Society of Automation or ISA, your role there, and then a little bit about the work it does to support the adoption of industrial automation technology.

Leonard Dentone 
Yes, so the International Society of Automation is a nonprofit organization founded in 1945 under the name of Instrument Society of America. And then it decided to expand the scope to automation when automation started becoming a thing. Its purpose is education, training, networking and setting standards for a wide range of instrumentation and automation technology in the industrial world. Many of its standards constitute the global reference in their field especially ISA 62443, which is very well known in the cybersecurity world. And then ISA88 and 95 in batch control and manufacturing operations management, respectively. As a program chair of the Danish section. So, ISA is organized around local sections in different countries. I have responsibility in Denmark for preparing the content of the events and I work in close collaboration with the board of ISA to prepare meaningful comment, contents at our events in Denmark.
It's important for me to state that I today I talk on my behalf, not on behalf of ISA, just for housekeeping. And then I earned my living as a senior consultant in a Danish consulting organization called Implement Consulting Group. It's a powerhouse of 1,800 people and I'm part of a practice that deals with the operational excellence and specifically I am part of a working group that drives helping manufacturing companies in achieving digitalization across the whole spectrum. So, starting from strategy, going into technology design, vendor selection and implementation. So, across the whole chain with a very hands-on approach.

Mark Patrick 
We're going to come on to talk about many of the aspects you've mentioned there. Some of our listeners, perhaps they're not completely familiar with the industrial automation world. So perhaps you can give us a sense of the brief history of industrial automation and perhaps people forget really that's come from a long time ago, but what does that backstory look like and how have we arrived at Industry 5.0?

Leonard Dentone 
Absolutely. So, we talk about five industrial revolutions if we may call them this way. First industrial revolution was about the introduction of steam engine and mass production. The second one was about the introduction of electrification and advancements in steel and chemical industry mainly. And then we really talk about industrial automation starting from the third industrial revolution. So, with the advent of computers and more advanced digital technologies and electronics, they started taking over on shop floors around the world. And then when we look into Industry 4, I like to explain what it is about using a maturity model developed by Aachen University in Germany, which defines Industry 4 as a journey outlined in four steps. The total steps are a six, the first two are referred to in the Industry 3 and the latter four are referred to Industry 4. "
So, if we talk about step number one, it all starts with computerization. So, bringing digital technology and electronics on shop floor. So being able to sense and manipulate the production processes through sensors, actuators and digital logic that that didn't need human intervention in order to act on a production process. Then we proceed into the second level, which is connectivity, being able to control the machines from a central point or not necessarily from distributed computers across the shop floor. And these two steps are sequential as one may understand, and they are part of Industry 3. 
If we look into Industry 4, the first step on the maturity journey is bringing visibility into what's happening on the shop floor. So, starting, connecting all the assets onto screens and making the data available on the shop floor, not necessarily acting upon it because there is not necessarily a shared understanding of what this data means. On the fourth maturity level that is about transparency. So, starting finally to understand what the data is telling us and act upon it. 
The fifth level is predictability. So being able to not just react upon information that is happening in real time but being able to understand what is going to happen in the future. So, predict behaviors of machines, of processes, and of people utilizing data and advanced technologies and then being prepared towards what is happening. So being able to adapt before events are happening. And the last level is about self-optimization. So, we heard about lights out factories and all those engineers dreaming a world where we don't need humans on the shop floors because those machines are just working autonomously. So, they are able to react independently on the basis of the data that they collect and the whole production processes are orchestrated in a self-optimizing way. Now one may ask what comes after this doesn't sound like there is a lot more and yet we still have to talk about Industry 5.
So, Industry 5 was born out of a European Union initiative. European Union is a supernational union of countries that is economical, political, but it's a lot about aligning all these countries, member countries across Europe on a series of values. And the policymakers, they have listed these sustainable development goals that they are really much around being the triple bottom line, so people, profit, and planet. So being able to, being able not to focus only on profit, but also on providing a positive change to the world. And if you think about what happened during Covid, then the link between this what I just said, so alignment towards positive values and what happened during Covid explains the three pillars of Industry 5, which is nothing but a change in the approach to which we look at the industrial revolution. So, the three pillars are sustainability, resilience, and human centricity.
If we think about Covid, the word, resilience, we all have heard this so many times and it's about being able to react to disruptions, but we can list countless different examples that affected supply chains in the last years. We talk about human centricity that is stemming from an increased focus in workers' wellbeing that Covid really put in the spotlight because people are not willing to come back to work with the same conditions before Covid, right? And sustainability is just in line with the policymakers’ efforts to make our future greener and make sure that we are more aware and sensitive to our planet's resources. So, in terms of technology, there is not really a step change. Maybe just in terms of an increased focus on artificial intelligence because that's news that came especially with generative AI that came after Covid. At least it boosted - started taking over after Covid, but it's really a change in approach. So sometimes I call it Industry 4.1 due to this reason, not a step change in technology but just in the approach. But then policy makers are much better at marketing than I am, and they understand the need of branding it under name Industry 5 instead of Industry 4.1 to stress the importance about this change in the approach and make sure people get it really.

Mark Patrick 
Yeah. Yeah, that's an interesting point. Going back to what you were saying earlier, the enabling technology, I see the same picture. It's largely the same with an increased availability and accessibility to AI tools now, which will, I guess further, enhance the capabilities and the human centricity side of it. I know we'll come on to talk more about this, but that utopian dream of a completely robotic production process - lights out as you were saying - I think is something out of a science fiction movie perhaps rather than reality because of course we still need to have meaningful work and meaningful jobs for people. Which could be one of the benefits of Industry 5 as we see people moving into perhaps higher value roles. Which leads me to my next question really because having set the scene there of what industrial automation is, how we've arrived at where we are, what 5.0 really means, what do you see as the benefits to both people and processes by adopting this human-centric approach? Sustainability and resilience I think are very easy to, certainly at a high level, explain, but when you get into human centricity then of course we start to think differently. So, what do you see as the benefits there?

Leonard Dentone 
Engineers, and I'm allowed to do say this because I speak as one, are not as emotionally intelligent as other people generally. So, we need someone to remind us that employees are people before they are numbers, before they are FTEs. 

Mark Patrick 
Yeah, I'm more than a number.

Leonard Dentone 
And as we have explained a minute ago, anything that comes before lights out factories and the level six of the maturity index in the Aachen University's Industry 4 model, anything involves people is mannered to a certain extent and this increased focus on better working condition is very crucial for especially retention, engagement and an attraction. We want to talk with the business leaders in the industry. I've heard multiple times that the nature of work after Covid has changed. Now it's harder to get people to show up on time, to show up even, it's much harder to retain them and especially attract people from the younger generations because they are less and less willing to work in this noise and dirty, repetitive jobs.

Mark Patrick 
A set of different expectations I think came out of that situation. And I think even in our world, which is distribution, you end up coming up with a hybrid model that satisfies the needs that became apparent certainly after Covid.

Leonard Dentone 
Absolutely. And one of the key drivers behind these human-centric approach is that workforce in first world countries is shrinking. By 2040 we will see 1.3 million less FDs in Germany. See I just called employees people as FDs to prove my point earlier, 7 million in Japan decrease and 81 staggering, 81 million in China. So, workforce is shrinking and it's becoming more fluid. Last year, I was working for a very large corporation within the food and beverage industry producing packaging and they had facilities in Phoenix, Arizona in a large industrial park. And what we have seen in that situation was that this factory had a huge turnover in employee turnover above 50% per year. So, this factory had a massive problem around attracting people, keeping them in their factory, and then training continuously new people just simply because a new factory was popping up next to it and they were able to offer a slightly better working condition or slightly higher salary and then people were just shifting. So, this is one of the reasons why human centricity will become more and more important and it's good that we have highlighted stress on it because it tends to be overlooked in this continuous drive for optimization and more efficient processes.

Mark Patrick 
Which I guess is what you're describing is the former sort of asset-centric approach, which that's all that mattered really. Whereas of course without people's involvement and the creativity and flexibility and adaptability that people bring into a situation that couldn't continue. So, you come up with a shift I guess from asset centric to human centric. Is that a fair description of what you experienced in Phoenix?

Leonard Dentone 
Yes, absolutely. And so, the industrial world has been historically characterized by high capital investments. So naturally there is a high focus on assets and how to get the best out of the invested capital, obviously. But what we see today is that there are technologies that are increasingly human-centric and one of the clear examples, and that's proven by the fact that it sees one of the highest market growths in industrial software is this new family of connected worker applications. They’re nothing but some light applications that can run on tablet or phone and they are more similar to what employees are used to use in their personal lives, on their smartphones. And they are all about providing a lighter way to engage with each other, to engage with machinery, to capture knowledge and to share it between each other. They become a powerful tool. And they are an example of human-centric application as opposed to for example, manufacturing execution system, especially the large ones that historically have dominated the market where the focus was really machines and assets and less about providing a user-friendly interface to people and so on and so forth.

Mark Patrick 
Which are the things that we naturally experience in our everyday lives, as you said in personal lives. So that makes it so much easier and so much more intuitive for people to work in what could potentially be a highly complex technology-based landscape. So, getting that interface I think is critical to having the human centricity as you've described. 

Leondard Dentone
Absolutely. 

Mark Patrick
If this conversation has sparked your interest in Industry 5, you can explore more from Mouser’s Empowering Innovation Together content series by visiting mouser.com/empowering-innovation.